“Gaming as Therapy” Autism Event

Cipher Prime is excited to announce that on April 19th, we will be partnering with the Academy of Natural Sciences to hold an autism event called “Gaming as Therapy: A Pathway to Interaction“! This event will explore video games as a potential form of therapy for autism, and as a social bridge between autistic and non-autistic people.

Although we didn’t design our games with autism in mind, over the years, we’ve received many emails from parents of children on the spectrum, thanking us for creating experiences that they could share with their kids. These messages inspired us to further explore the link between gaming and autism, and to work toward promoting neurodiversity.

That’s why we’re doing this event. We’ll be sharing our games (including Auditorium, Pulse, and Splice) and others’, and Cipher Prime co-founder Dain Saint will be one of three speakers discussing the relationship between gaming and autism. We invite you to spend an evening with us learning, playing games, and forming friendships.

Brian Provinciano Q&A Session

In other news, we’ve been on a Retro City Rampage rampage. This satirical open-world action game was the subject of last Dev Night‘s “game club,” and next week we’ll be hosting a virtual Q&A Session with the game’s creator,Brian Provinciano! So haul your tuckus over to Cipher Prime (239 Chestnut Street) next Thursday at 8:00 PM to join the discussion!

We love games. We love making them, playing them, talking about them, licking them, etc. This weekend, one lucky Cipher Primate (the author of this post, in fact) attended PAX East, where she fangirl’d hard while helping represent the Philly dev scene.

But enough about us. We want to hear about you! Comment, and tell us your PAX East stories! Coolest story posted by next Thursday (4/4/2013) wins a free Steam key for Splice, Auditorium or Fractal–your choice. We can’t wait to hear from you!

This February, Cipher Prime had the honor of being featured in IndieCade East 2013! For one orgasmic weekend of indie love, we shipped off to New York City’s Museum of the Moving Image to share our games with developers, artists, press, and fellow game enthusiasts alike.

We demoed Splice and gave a show-and-tell session about its production. We also participated in the GameSlam, a three-minute pitch-your-game throw-down with other developers, where we showed off a prototype called Intake.

We played and were inspired by other featured games, including the gorgeous four-paneled puzzler Gorogoa and the face-meltingly competitive Hokra. Our favorite gaming experience, though, was helping an auditorium of people collectively guide a spaceship to safety using laser pointers in Renga.

We also explored the museum’s “Spacewar! Video Games Blast Off” exhibition, which explored the evolution of videogames from the first digital video game, Spacewar!. We had the most fun shooting life-sized portals onto a massive wall projection of Portal.

IndieCade was exhilarating, and we feel privileged to have been a part of it. We can’t wait until next year!

This year’s GDC was a pretty awesome week for us. One of the highlights was being able to show off our upcoming release Pulse. We’re thankful it made a great impression on both Macworld and Pocket Gamer, but we’re also thankful we were able to play around with a lot of cool games from other developers. We were lucky enough to be judges for the IGF (Independent Games Festival), and want you to know about a few games we loved:

Solace, in all its glory.

Solace is a great indie music game, and we love the guys behind it,who we fist met this past year at Indie Cade. Rob-thanks for giving Will a badge. Dan, you and the Danish game have a special place in our hearts. If the rest of you don’t know what we’re talking about here, that’s okay. The most important thing is that you give Solace a look. You won’t be disappointed.

Helsing’s Fire, from Ratloop is an innovative puzzle game that’s a hell of a lot of fun. We met the guys behind the game when they presented at the Flash Gaming Summit. We truly love them, and love to see our friends doing well. Nice work, boys!

Solipskier in action. See what we mean about the rainbows?!

Solipskier is an addictive, fast-paced game created by our friends Mike and Greg. We have a lot of respect for them because they run a two-man studio, and crank out awesome games. Make sure to check out Solipski… especially because it has rainbows. Any game with rainbows is a win in our book.

Bit.Trip Runner, by Gaijin Games – We love the Bit.Trip series, and the team over at Gaijin. We look to them for inspiration and always enjoy hearing about their successes, since we’re both similar studios. Chris Osborn, who’s had his hand in the game, was a wonderful addition to our GDC experience. The conference wouldn’t have been the same without you, buddy!

Nidhogg. No seriously, Nidhogg. There’s not much to say about this fantastic game, except that it’s one of the best ways to kill a few hours. We played a round in the office not too long ago (Will won, of course) and can’t wait to make time for a rematch. Don’t let the old school graphics fool you: Nidhogg will rock your socks off.

Shot Shot Shoot – This is Will’s personal favorite for the iPad, and a game that we feel is worthy of competitive gamers everywhere. It was one of the nominees for “Best Mobile Game” at IGF, and we couldn’t agree more. The visual simplicity of this “minimalistic dueling game” will have you trying to conquer your friends. Trust us; Will’s already clocked in some serious hours.

Honorable Mentions

Amnesia won Best Audio, and for good reason: the game wouldn’t be what it is without the haunting soundtrack. The game shows off an attention to detail that we haven’t seen from anyone in quite awhile. Check this one out.

Bastion is a neat action RPG that has some seriously awesome voice-overs. Overall, we dig this game.